News: Medford Shooting Victims
(Long Island, N.Y.) Since a gunman seeking prescription drugs took the lives of four people, Long Island residents have been following the story of the Medford tragedy. Four sets of funerals and wakes were scheduled in the past week. Memorial services and dedications were conducted, one of which was intended for a seventeen-year-old girl set to graduate high school.
Another victim, a seventy-one-year-old man, was preparing to celebrate his fiftieth wedding anniversary at the time of the shooting. Friends and family members of the couple had scheduled a surprise celebration for the July 16th occasion. The victim had been married to his Babylon High School sweetheart, and remained devoted to her throughout the final moments of his life.
His wife had undergone a triple-bypass heart surgery on June 13th and was still recovering from the procedure. She had been cared for at Stony Brook University Medical Center. The surgery had been postponed once before due to a case of poison ivy.
This time, everything went as scheduled and the only thing left to do was retrieve her medication from the local pharmacy. While the seventy-one-year-old would have done so the night before the incident, he was forced to return the following morning when the store reopened. Picking up the prescription from Haven Drugs was the first task on his Sunday morning/Father’s Day to-do list.
The forty-five-year-old pharmacist who lost his life after chatting with the gunman had spent Saturday night with co-workers from a different pharmacy. Since he and his wife had no children, he agreed to work on Sunday in the place of a fellow employee and father. He was best known for his calm, smiling demeanor and having assisted an elderly woman in her car.
The woman’s child attended his services along with classmates from the St. Francis Preparatory School Class of ’83. They claimed that he took extra shifts with the hopes of retiring early and frequently made the ten-mile trip to work from his home in Centereach. He received his pharmacy degree at St. John’s University and often got together with old friends and classmates.
The thirty-three-year-old victim was a woman planning an elaborate Father’s Day BBQ just months before her scheduled wedding. Guests were expected at two-thirty that afternoon and were to be served everything from lamb chops to filet mignon. She had spent an estimated three-hundred dollars on groceries for the party, and was picking up her thyroid medicine as the start to a hectic day.
The fall wedding was to be celebrated at the Brentwood Country Club. She lived in Farmingville with her fiancé, a man who referred to her as the perfect wife. This was to be her second marriage; the first ended in divorce in 2006 after fifteen years. She had a sixteen-year-old and six-year-old daughter with her first husband and worked as a physical therapist’s aide at St. Charles Rehab in Centereach.
The seventeen-year-old victim was a regular church attendee, and did so in the days prior to the incident. That Father’s Day morning she rushed out of the house, running late for her 10am shift, and assured her father that she’d see him later. She didn’t have time to give him a hug.
